A web page may comprise a mix of relatively “static portions of content” that are intended to be presented for all viewers of the page regardless of how they arrived at the page. A web page can also comprise relatively “dynamic portions of content” that are retrieved and/or generated and/or composed in response to browsing activities. For example, when a browsing user visits a web page of a content publisher or provider (e.g., HTTP://www.news.com), the content provider presents relatively static portions of the web page (e.g., headlines, lead articles, etc.), intermixed with relatively dynamic portions of the web page (e.g., ads, beacons, hyperlinks, etc.). Processing resources demanded and processing time incurred for rendering (e.g., processing web page markup code for execution and display to a user's display terminal) can be deterministic. For example, when a web page is comprised of purely static portions of content rendering performance can be predicted quite accurately. However, rendering resources and time incurred can vary widely, for example, when a web page includes dynamic portions of content. When a web page is comprised of many dynamic portions of content, the likelihood of incurring rendering latency increases. In some cases incurring rendering latency detracts from a user's experience. More specifically, one or more dynamic portions of the web page may be based on the user's browsing activities, and performance of such browsing activities may incur latency. In some cases, ads or beacons or hyperlinks or other information comprising the dynamic content may be selected and/or composed in real time by an external or third party provider (e.g., an ad data provider). In some cases, the content may be composed with respect to matches between user demographics and/or other information that can be known about the user in conjunction with any of various characteristics of an advertiser's campaign.
The actions involved in the foregoing can be accomplished by carrying out a computer-to-computer exchange of messages over a network. For example, the content provider may place some code (e.g., one or more beacons) in the web page markup document (e.g., HTML document) such that whenever the web page is loaded for viewing in a browser and/or the user interacts with the web page (e.g., the user clicks an ad, hovers over an ad, etc.), the code sends information (e.g., using HTTP calls, using IMAP calls, etc.) to advertisers who might want to present an ad or banner or other sort of message to that particular user, and/or collect information about the user (e.g., user interests as pertaining to the presented web page).
There can be any number of advertisers who are interested in knowing about the activity associated with a browsing session by a person having certain attributes, and any or all of such advertisers might want to have their respective code (e.g., beacons) included in the web page. Unfortunately, the technological limitations of the legacy approaches for including specific content for multiple advertisers in a given web page introduces undesirable latency during processing (e.g., loading, parsing, displaying, etc.) of the fully-composited web page to the user. Such latency—especially in cases when there are many potentially interested advertisers—can detract from the user browsing experience at the web page of the content provider. In cases where there is a very large number of advertisers that want to have beacons included in the web page, the latency can be long, and can severely detract from the user browsing experience.
Techniques are needed to address the problem of including content from multiple advertisers in a browsing session or web page while managing web page load latency so as to avoid detracting from the user experience. Specifically, improved techniques and, in particular, addressing the deficiencies of legacy technologies are needed to address the problem of long latencies for loading of web pages issuing a large number of advertiser HTTP calls. Improvements to the applications and efficiencies of technologies are needed.